'Darkest Hour' 4K Blu-ray Review: HDR's Finest Hour

While Darkest Hour has won awards galore for Gary Oldman’s performance as Sir Winston Churchill, and for the efforts of the hair and makeup department for the part they played in his astonishing transformation, it hasn’t picked up many ‘best film’ gongs. And I’d say that seems pretty fair.

Oldman’s performance really is astonishing. He turns into Britain’s war-time Prime Minister so completely that you just feel like you’re watching Churchill himself, right from the film’s earliest moments. He also carries the entire film on his shoulders with outstanding charisma and conviction.

The script sags in a couple of places, though, and one or two sequences - especially a pivotal one where Churchill seeks the opinion of ‘Joe Public’ on a train - feel overly contrived.

One area where the awards season might have been a little kinder on Darkest Hour, though, is production design. Watching the film on this beautifully mastered 4K Blu-ray rams home just what a handsome piece of work it is, thanks to some gorgeously staged and dramatically lit sets that give the film a strikingly internalized, almost other-worldly atmosphere.

This visually echoes and underlines the claustrophobic and stark pressure Churchill was put under by his conviction that Hitler could only be dealt with by force, not negotiation.

Especially at the point in World War II where the Nazis were at their most apparently unstoppable.

Overall, Darkest Hour offers a compelling new perspective on Operation Dynamo that’s worthy of your time and includes a couple of genuinely spine-tingling moments. It’s just not quite an absolute stone-wall classic.

So extreme is the difference between the phenomenal dynamics of the 4K Blu-ray image and the SDR HD image, in fact, that you pretty much feel like you’re watching two different films. With the 4K Blu-ray version being by far the better of the two movies.

Part of this is down to the way Joe Wright has directed the film. Almost every shot features exceptionally intense use of light and shade, and the drama and intensity of this thematically stark approach is rendered so much more dramatically by the expanded light range of HDR that the SDR Blu-ray looks DOA in comparison.

The most intensely dark areas - such as the blackness around the lift Churchill rides out of the Cabinet War Rooms - look profoundly, deeply, richly black. Sun beams, glints in eyes, daylight reflections on faces and so on, by comparison, look spectacularly bright.

I can’t currently think of another film that delivers such extremes of light and dark so consistently. And as such it’s a fantastic demo disc for what HDR can do.

It’s a slightly less emphatic - or at least, less consistent - demonstration of the wide color technology that accompanies HDR on 4K Blu-ray discs.

The scenes in Parliament benefit from some of the boldest use of HDR.Photo: Darkest Hour, Universal Pictures

Skin tones still look natural despite the much higher light intensity, though, and there are some occasionally gorgeous tones on show from the film’s artificial light sources (especially during the radio broadcast scene and the visits to Buckingham Palace) and the various, subtly delineated hues of wood, alcohol and leather books that litter Churchill’s home.

For the most part, however, the film’s stark approach slightly limits just how far the 4K Blu-ray master can dial up its saturations. Though this fact does at least mean that when a color does suddenly look rich for some thematic or emphatic reason, it makes all the more impact.

Detail levels on the Darkest Hour 4K Blu-ray are very good rather than great. Which is probably a fair reflection of a film that was only shot at 2.8K but granted a 4K Digital Intermediate for its cinema run.

There’s a nice extra sense of snap and sharpness to the image for many scenes - especially in areas of harsh lighting. There’s also a palpable increase in detail in most foreground and some background objects, which often helps to define a more realistic and immersive sense of space. Especially in relatively ornate locations such as Churchill’s home and Buckingham Palace.

Some of the relatively bland, uniform colors of the background walls of the War Rooms can look a touch soft and processed at times, though, as well as showing marginal color banding where they’re illuminated by lamp light arcs. This banding can very occasionally be seen, too, at the edges of some of the most highly exposed skin tones.

A Dolby Vision master would have been nice in a perfect world - especially as the disc’s packaging on its UK/Northern Ireland release clearly states that there should be one! The bottom line, though, is even with just an HDR10 transfer to work with, the good stuff about the Darkest Hour’s 4K Blu-ray picture far, far outweighs the bad - sometimes to demo-grade effect.

Sound quality

The Dolby Atmos track provided with the Darkest Hour is not as reference grade as its pictures. But this is hardly a surprise; after all, this is a film that spends the majority of its time showing people talking around tables and in underground bunkers. Avengers: Infinity War it most definitely is not.

Behind every great man, etc.Photo: Darkest Hour, Universal Pictures

Within the context of its relatively ‘low octane’ nature, though, it’s a pretty nice effort. The front soundstage, in particular, is beautifully drawn, sounding open, dynamic, detailed, and pristinely clean. There’s no hint of harshness, imbalance or ragged/over-exposed vocals.

There’s even a decent sense of scale in the front soundstage that sees it delivering height as well as width.

The rear soundstage is a little underused compared with the fronts. Especially when it comes to delivering Dario Marianelli’s effective (if not especially memorable) score. There are some good ambient effects, though - especially during the sequences in the underground War Rooms.

The rear soundstage does also explode into life quite boldly from time to time - such as in the rowdier moments in the House of Commons, and when a plane roars overhead as Churchill leaves France. It’s just a pity the rear channels aren’t used slightly more consistently.

Extra features

The only extra on the 4K Blu-ray is a commentary track by director Joe Wright. This is a pretty decent effort that takes in at a steady pace a good variety of film-making concerns, from the shooting style, locations, story development and costumes through to Oldman’s prosthetics and casting.

Darkest Hour's 4K cover art.Photo: Darkest Hour, Universal Pictures

The only other two extra features provided are found on the HD Blu-ray. A ‘making of’ documentary is decent enough, managing to squeeze a good amount of behind the scenes footage and cast and crew interviews into its running time. Though given that this running time is only nine minutes, it can’t go into any real depth.

As such, it might have made a decent opening piece for a more in-depth sequence of subsequent featurettes. Unfortunately, though, the only other extra is a four-minute look at how Gary Oldman became Churchill for the film.

The failure to provide any other features providing more historical background to the film’s story is a massive disappointment.

Verdict

As well as being a good film elevated to must-see status by Gary Oldman’s amazing performance as Churchill, Darkest Hour is a must-own 4K Blu-ray thanks to its sensationally rich showcase of the joys of HDR.

I've spent the past 20 years writing about the world of home entertainment technology--first at Home Cinema Choice magazine, where I became Deputy Editor, and for the past 20 years on a freelance basis. In that time I'm fairly confident that I've reviewed more TVs and proje...